Have jobs and wages stopped rising? Productivity and structural change in advanced countries

Fabiano Compagnucci, Andrea Gentili, Enzo Valentini and Mauro Gallegati

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2021, vol. 56, issue C, 412-430

Abstract: This paper is aimed at studying the long run relationship between GDP per capita growth and the job “required” by such a growth. This relationship, which has been positive for a long period after World War II, leading to a more equal and wealthy society via the labour market, turned out to be non-positive since the middle of the 1980s, giving rise to the so-called ”Jobless Growth” and “Jobless Recovery” phenomena. By analysing data from STAN databases throughout the period 1970–2015, we found that the break in the relation between GDP per capita growth and employment can be explained by the decoupling between productivity from one hand, and labour compensation and utilisation from the other. Our findings further suggest that different economic sectors specifically contributed to the productivity change in accordance with their technological and knowledge intensity.

Keywords: Labour productivity; Jobless growth; Decoupling; Structural change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J30 L16 O14 O33 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X17301832
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:streco:v:56:y:2021:i:c:p:412-430

DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2018.07.003

Access Statistics for this article

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen

More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().